Joseph Jenkins – Crazy About Compost

Compost Sanitation in Post Earthquake Haiti

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAuOHecBxP0 Joe's on fire for this presentation... I wonder if it's because it's for the U.S. Composting Council, and my guess is he has to be sharp for those folks. I wonder how supportive the U.S. Composting Council is of the best composting process you can be involved with...would be fun to write them about it (just did). I wish I had the cover materials available that they do in Haiti... tons and tons of sugar cane bagasse. He has 15 gallon buckets in use here, with the front of the compost toilet open. I fill my 5 gallon bucket pretty quickly and would love to try a 15 gallon. I guess the front is open so you don't have to pick it up as high...might be pretty heavy to…

Humanure Handbook review

If there was any book I'd recommend, even to someone that generally isn't interested in environmental issues, it's Humanure Handbook. I can confidently say this book is at the level of Silent Spring. How could a book about composting your bowel movements be important? Urine, feces and food scraps are super high in nitrogen. Leaves, cardboard, paper, straw, hay etc are all high in carbon. When you mix these two components together, in time you get beautiful, fertile compost that our earth desperately needs. What you don't get is chlorine and sodium hypochlorite (amongst other things used in water treatment process), and polluted air from burning off sewage sludge, or possibly worse having that sewage sludge spread on farmlands as a "soil amendment". Jenkins goes into great detail about the…

Holy Crap! My Very Own Compost Toilet.

After nearly a month of simply having a 5 gallon bucket and some sawdust, I finally built my own proper compost toilet! It cost me a total of about $20 and two hours of work to get it done...well worth it. This lives in my basement, but I brought it outside to snap a well-lit photo in front of its "sewer system" (the compost pile). I simply followed the instructions in Joseph Jenkins' Humanure Handbook ...I strongly suggest picking this up. Even if you have no interest in humanure composting, it's still a very critical read for learning the history of human waste and how we've broken the human nutrient cycle. For the fecophobes out there: read about thermal kill times and how compost has been used to fully bioremediate…